Nerd’s Eye View
How do bookstores decide which books they are going to stock? If you’re like me a couple of years ago, you’ll be thinking that there is a master list made by someone that is sent out every January titled “Great Books That You Should Have Read Yesterday” and booksellers just pull from that list alphabetically until their shop is full.
Insider’s tip: this is not what happens.
Before I worked at a bookstore, I had literally no idea how stores got my favorite thing in the world from the author’s hands to mine. In addition to the answer above I might have mumbled something about “publishers…?” with some vague hand gestures thrown in for spice. Though I’ve been working at Avid for just about a year, last September is when I really got the proper answer to the question.
SIBA stands for the Southern Independent Booksellers Conference. It is a place for booksellers from all over the south to congregate and get way too intense about books. The official purpose is to learn how to be a better bookseller, how to get more of the right books onto shelves and into people’s hands. You attend seminars on various bookselling topics, as well as network with booksellers who have been in the business for over 40 years (and ones that have been in the business for less than four months), and you have the opportunity to learn about dozens upon dozens of books in just a few days
Conferences like this are a large part of what booksellers use to curate their shop to their customers’ preferences. The first day, which is really just an evening, consists of a tour of a few local bookshops where you can check out other stores’ awesome displays and selections, meet the owners, and mingle a bit with your fellow booksellers from across the south. The next day, you hit the ground running. There are multiple seminars every hour on a wide range of topics starting around 9am and ending around 1pm. Even if you fill your entire morning with educational talks, you won’t be able to go to all of them. That’s when you ask your fellow booksellers to take notes so you can exchange and share later! After lunch comes panels — great sessions where authors of books come together and discuss what they’ve written as well as the essential message behind their book. It’s basically book-nerd heaven. No big deal.
The day after is mostly about the trade show. This is when many publishers from all over the country gather in a large room and tell you about the books that they really believe in for the upcoming season. This could be books that they think will be very popular and will sell well, or books that they personally love and want to get into booksellers’ hands so that they will be as popular as they deserve to be. After the whirlwind weekend of activity, the only thing left — for Avid booksellers at least — was the drive back home.
Between all of the bookselling education, and being able to sit with authors (including one of my new favorites: Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta and, now, An American Marriage) at dinner each night and hear about their new releases, I was just this short of being overwhelmed. All a bookseller is, is that kid who used to get scolded in class because they were always reading instead of listening. Those kids grew up, started working in bookstores, and then organized conferences where they could go and talk to others just like them! What I and other Avid booksellers learned at SIBA is going to help the shop for years to come, but the relationships we form and maintain at the conference last decades.
Title credit goes to the hilarious Caleb Zane Huett.
